Smyser, Dick

SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF DICK SMYSER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 10, 2003
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok. So, tell me, tell me ... first off, you can say, you know, I'm Dick Smyser and I was the publisher of The Oak Ridger or whatever you were or the editor of the Oak Ridger from such and such, if you could just start out with that.
MR. SMYSER: I'm Dick Smyser, and I was the first editor of The Oak Ridger. Actually my title at the beginning was Managing Editor. I was here from the very first issue in January 20th, 1949, and remained as a working editor until about 1986, well actually a little bit later than that. In 1986 I took a leave for a year as a visiting professor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage for a year. Came back here for another year, and then went to become a visiting professor at three other universities. So I became something less than a fulltime editor from about 1987 through about 1993, when I officially retired from The Oak Ridger.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you came here what year?
MR. SMYSER: 1949.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1949.
MR. SMYSER: January, 1949.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so tell me a little bit about Oak Ridge when you first came here, when you were first ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, it was still very much in the transition stage from World War II towards what we then referred to, we wanted to become a normal city, end quotes, and the town was, the severe mud days were over, but it was still somewhat of a frontier town. They were only then beginning to install sidewalks, and curbs, and paved roads in the residential area, but still had very much the pioneer spirit about it. It was recovering from the impact after the immediate, after World War II, there were massive layoffs, particularly at the Y-12 Plant, and many people thought the town was going to disappear as quickly as it had appeared, and we were part of, the newspaper was part of the effort to convince people otherwise. With me, Alfred and Julia Hill the original founders of the Oak Ridger, the parents of Tom Hill who is still here, and very much here in town, they were sought out by the Federal government to come down here and start a daily newspaper, a free press, free enterprise newspaper, because the Fed felt a community newspaper was essential to the town making its transition to self-government and private home ownership. So we were enlisted to help with that effort. Although we were unrestricted like any other newspaper, but we knew from the start that that was our mission, that that was our big story, covering the transition period.
MR. MCDANIEL: What about, tell me about your staff. Tell me a little bit about ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, we had a quite small staff at that time, we had, I was the managing editor, we had a city editor, we had a sports editor, we had the, in those days we called it the women's editor, and I guess we had one or two reporters. So it was pretty much about a five or six person staff in 1949 when we put out our first issue. Yes, we established our own newspaper plant. Actually, the Hills were, the Hills made the commitment to start the newspaper in the early fall of 1948. They named Don McCarry who, Don McCarry and I were working at that time for the Chester, Pennsylvanian Times, which Alfred and Julia Hill, they're publishing at that time, that's how we ended up down here. Don was the advertising manager; I was just a young reporter on their staff, and then Alfred named Don the publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Don came down here probably as early as October or November 1948 and accomplished what many in the newspaper business thought was a miracle. They were able to get, start from the very beginning, and get all the equipment necessary so that we could put out a newspaper on January 20th. Interesting little sideline to that, as Alfred Hill and Julia Hill negotiated, it was then the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of Oak Ridge, and it was the only civilian-created agency that took over from the military at World War II. Alfred said, “Do you want us to be in publishing?” And they said, “Well, we plan to take down the gates of the city on January 20th, 1949, and what we need for you to do is put out your first issue on that day.” Well, we did, but they didn't. We made the deadline, but they didn't. They didn't open the gates until two months later on March 19th of 1949. We have always sort of held that over their heads, because it really was that. We moved to an old laundry building down on Tyron Road. People have lived here for twenty or thirty years will remember that that is where we were located for our first twenty or thirty years, and we literally turned that building into a newspaper plant. That is no small feat, because newspapers in those days, the equipment was heavy, big cumbersome presses, big cumbersome linotype machines, and to locate all of that equipment, and get it operating, literally within the space of, let's see from October to January, that's about four months. Don McCarry was here on the scene. Don is deceased, his daughter is Connie Adams, and they were still very much here in Oak Ridge and with The Oak Ridger until about a week ago, but he accomplished that miracle. I was, didn't actually come here until about a week before we started publication, so I can't claim any great credit for amassing those physical resources. But we got busy in a hurry, and we were busy from the first day. Oak Ridge was a, turned out an amazing amount of news and still does, local news.
MR. MCDANIEL: What ... local news.
MR. SMYSER: That was what we came here to do, to cover the local news story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me a little bit about that relationship between the government and the newspaper and, I'm sure there were, I'm sure there were times you were frustrated because you wanted to get information about things, or maybe you weren't. Maybe you just knew that was the nature of the ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, we reflected the community and, of course, the community was frustrated during, the crucial years were 1949-1959, those were the transition years, and the community was very frustrated because it took a long time to get the Atomic Energy Commission to make, what we felt, were the necessary commitments. These are some of the same issues that we are talking about today. The community properly wanted assurances that the Atomic Energy Commission was going to pay, make a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes because we couldn't tax our chief industry, and we wanted to be sure that when they sold the houses that they sold them in an orderly fashion, so that there wasn't chaos. It took very involved congressional legislation to get all of this done, and there were many moments of frustration and impatience along the way with the establishment here. It was never a suggestion on the part of the Atomic Energy Commission that we should be other than a free, aggressive, skeptical, questioning press. I will tell you just one little incident, and there were many people in town that didn't think that we would be that, they thought we were going to kowtow to the, that we were going to be under the control of the Federal government. Just within weeks after we started our publication we came to what was then was a major issue, though it sounds kind of trivial now. There were many residents that lived in dormitories, and all of a sudden the contractor, the Federal contractor for the dormitories raised the rent. It caused a tremendous stink on the part of the dormitory residents. They protested loudly, they wrote letters to the editor, and we carried those letters. And a number of people came in to us and said, “You mean you're going to put in a letter that is critical of the powers that be here,” and we said, “Of course we are.” So we sort of gained some credentials. It was kind of good that that issue happened when it did. We gained credentials then and throughout that ten-year process. There were, as you say, there were many frustrations, but that was our big story. It is not often that a whole city makes the transition from being completely Federal ly owned and operated, to a self-governing home-owning community. That was our story. It went on day after day, development after development.
MR. MCDANIEL: What, in your tenure here, especially related to Oak Ridge and the industry, the government, what were some of the big stories that you covered? I know there were many, many, many but what are, you know, three or four that ...?
MR. SMYSER: Well, that was the big story. I say it continued, and there was development after development. If I could put my finger on any specific instances: there was finally the passage from the government, from the Congress, we called them the disposal bills, (it sounds like garbage collection), we referred this transition period as the community disposal bill. In fact, that was the name of the bill, the Community Disposition Bill. You can look at the headlines out here in the hallway, and you will see many of the developments along the way. There is one big headline out there that says, “Ike signs disposal hospital.” What that meant was that Eisenhower had signed the bill that Congress had passed, that set-up the framework to allow the government, in an orderly way, to sell the homes to encourage self-government. Prior to that package, it was that the Federal Government agreed to build us a new hospital, so that was that headline, and other than that, oh, we've got a big headline out there, “ORNL generates electricity.” The first reactor to generate its own electricity was a big story, a major story here, and then, of course, we had other developments later on, the Clinton desegregation controversy was one of our big major stories. I'm getting a little off the track now. I'm up to 1956 now.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok. That's all right.
MR. SMYSER: Well, we had other big stories to cover: James Earl Ray escapes, was a big story. That was 1977. The press came down here from all over the country, in fact all over the world, and set up shop in our building. We were still over there at Tyrone Road. We did have one major radiation incident here in June of 1958. There was at Y-12 an exposure of about, oh I think about 12, 15 persons out there, only about half of those were seriously exposed, none of them were fatally exposed, at least not at that time. Some of them died some years later, I guess from some of the aftereffects, but that was a big story. I remember that broke just at our press time, we literally stopped the presses, and at least got a little bit in the paper that kind of assured the community that even though it was serious, and they evacuated the whole Y-12 area, that there was no threat to the community. So there were other big stories along the way, but major and continuing was this transition, and selling the houses. Once they established the prices for the houses, people were reassured because the prices were very reasonable. They setup a priority system whereby the occupant of the home had the first opportunity to buy, and virtually everybody bought their house, and we would track those day-by-day. How many houses were sold and where they were sold. There was never any lack of local news. There was constant, constant local news. Then another major story, continuing story was the kind of relationship of Oak Ridge to the surrounding area here. Our relations to Anderson County: there was antagonism, social conflicts, cultural conflicts between the people here in Oak Ridge and the rest of Anderson County, and the resentment went both ways. I guess the most specific characterization of that were our bi-annual, was it bi-annual, that was every two years, yes, semi-annual is every six months, was literally our bi-annual liquor referendums. In those years, the only way, the Tennessee law provided only for a county option as to if liquor should be sold legally, and the Oak Ridge preponderant opinion was that legal sales was the proper way to go about it. The people outside of Oak Ridge and the rest of Anderson County felt directly opposite of that. So we would have these once every two years, you could have a liquor referendum, a county referendum every two years, and we had them virtually once every two years, and then in 1947, and the vote would always be, in Oak Ridge it would be 6 to 1 for legal control and about 10 to 1 against it out in the county, and they usually won by a small margin, although in 1947 the vote was in favor of legal sales. Although many people felt, even people here in Oak Ridge who were very disposed towards legal sales, they felt that there was a good bit of maneuvering of the ballots particularly at some of the Oak Ridge precincts, and that probably the Wets as we called ourselves had won but not in a very honest way. Very quickly in 1951, the pattern of the Dries winning, and that went on as I say about every two years, and that was always a source of friction. The Clinton Courier and News, a very fine weekly newspaper, was edited and published by Horace Wells. He was always heavily in support of prohibition in the county and we would always equally heavily in support of legal sales. So that is that kind of shows you the contrast and the opinions of people here in Oak Ridge and people outside of Oak Ridge. Which is not to say that there weren't significant prohibition-inclined people in the city also, it's just that the preponderance was in favor of legal sales. Well, we differed on other things too. Well first of all, in Oak Ridge’s early years, we were miserably under-represented both in our county government and in our state government. There was a period there, I think if we researched it we probably could have established that we were the least represented city in the country as far as having representation in the legislature that reflected our population, and representation in our, we called it the Anderson County Court in those days instead of the Anderson County Commission. As far as that, we had two, we called them JP's, the Justice of the Peace or Squires. We had two members of the court that was as large as 25 to 30 members, and here we were, in those days, with more than half of the population of the county, so this was a constant source of contention. We had trouble getting the right to vote here in Oak Ridge. This was before, but in the earliest years, there were no voting precincts in Oak Ridge. Oak Ridgers, if they wanted to vote, even in the presidential election of 1944, they had to drive to Clinton to vote. There was one famous instance where county officials, one of them made the routes to, to Clinton and it was over the Edgemore Bridge, which was an old rickety bridge, wooden panel bridge that you were never quite sure you were going to get over it. They closed that bridge the day before Election Day on some pretext of maintenance or something like that, so there were obstacles thrown in the way of Oak Ridgers on the part of County officials. So it was a two-way street, and finally we did get our voting precincts. Here, we got two at first and then four, and then we finally got eight, and then we finally got twelve, which is what we got. Oh I'm not sure what the number is now, I'm sure the number has been reduced a little bit. So there were those tensions. It was, probably the, the abuses were probably equal on both side. The county officials were not happy about all of a sudden this impact of this variegated population on what then were the established political patterns of the county, and they were anxious to hang on to their powers and Oak Ridge was threatening, so those were some of the tension of that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question, and I know now, The Oak Ridger, in the last few years, I've seen it, you know, fairly regularly challenge the government on issues, as well as they do, you know, not only the, not only the local, you know, city, county government, but, you know, the Federal Government about certain issues. Was that the case early on?
MR. SMYSER: Oh yes, the issues were different. We didn't have much, we weren't terribly concerned about, and maybe we should have been more concerned about environmental hazards here. That is the big tension point now of the government doing its role as far as cleaning up what were acknowledged insults to the environment here. Are they adequately compensating employees who were perhaps were or assuredly were damaged as far as their health was concerned. Those were not issues in those years. The issues were, well one of the issues is, was the government moving quickly enough towards on these issues relative to the sale and self-government, but there were other issues also. Oh, we had many fights over rent increases. The whole town you know, was subject to a massive rent increase on the part of the Federal Government. In retrospect, you look back on those and they are kind of silly, because we paid very little rent, but when they raised it there was a howl and a stink. I'm trying to think of some of the other issues. There were a lot of issues between the community and the Atomic Energy Commission. We did not have a legal city council until after we incorporated in 1959. Prior to that we had what we called an advisory town council, which was elected by the residents. On our own terms, we were not, we weren't a legal entity, so we couldn't hold elections on, under state election rules, but we had our own rules. There were many tensions: mostly was the government moving fast enough or adequately enough towards what we wanted, which was to establish our self-government, to buy our property, and to buy the land. So lots of disputes, and lots of letters to the editor, and lots of irate citizen delegations relative to those issues. In fact at one time, we joked in The Oak Ridger that we should have an airplane named the "Irate citizen," which would regularly carry citizens back and forth to Washington. Very frequently, we would have to go to Washington to complain about something to our congressman or our senator, as normally you would have gone to City Hall, we had to go to Washington. Our congressman was Howard Baker, Senior, the father of Howard Baker, Junior, who is now the Ambassador to Japan, I believe, and anyway, he was our congressman and we had to appeal to him on issues that now would be strictly local issues, we had to complain to him. Frequently there were congressional hearings relative to some seemingly minor community issue. Well I could recite four or five of them. One, we had a department store up here in Jackson Square, which most of the citizens, these are a generalization, felt was not doing its job: it was not carrying good stock, charged unfair prices many felt, and there was a feeling that we really needed a better department store. Of course the newspaper was finally interested in this because we needed the advertising. But that issue went to Congress, if you can believe that. That issue as to whether our department store was performing properly went right up to a congressional hearing in Washington. I had to attend one of those, and the issue, was should the lease for this department store, a Federal lease, be renewed or should the Fed go out and seek a better department store. So that's the kind of thing that now in retrospect sounds ridiculous that the U.S. Congress could have been concerned with this. As it turned out Congress agreed with us, that the previous department store was not doing a good job, and we got Loveman's from Chattanooga in their place, which was widely celebrated in the community, because we felt that they could do a much better job. So that is descriptive of the thing. One other thing I can remember being an issue before Congress or a Senate committee was whether or not the then operating contractor for the community, Roane Anderson Company, had wisely spent money to build fences around our garbage cans in the cemesto area. We had garbage cans that sat out in front of the houses. The story is, this is Jackie Franklin, she was the wife of one of the managers for the Atomic Energy Commission here, was so distressed about the appearance of the community with these garbage cans sitting exposed, unsheltered around houses that she insisted that the operating contractor erect these fences around them, and that ended up in Congress being debated as to whether this is an unnecessary expense on the part of the Federal government. That's just a little bit descriptive of some of the seemingly trivial community issues that we couldn't settle locally and we had to travel to Washington to try to settle it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Outside of politics, talk a little bit about just community life. You know, what was, what was living in Oak Ridge in those early days and, you know, even through the first couple of decades, what was that like? I mean, socially, recreationally …
MR. SMYSER: Well, this was a livewire community even, as I said I came here in '49, by that time the town had sort of settled down. It had been through the war years where there was a sense of mission, and then particularly during the 1946 and 1947, where were the major changes and major lay-offs, and some big questions of what was going to happen to Oak Ridge. A lot of those questions were answered when the Senate and the Congress, after intense debate did decide to establish the Atomic Energy Commission, a civilian agency that would run the nuclear establishment, as opposed to the military. That was a major decision. Who knows what would have happened if that did not occur, because one of the first decisions that the Atomic Energy Commission made was that these communities, not just Oak Ridge, but Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, that they should remain communities and that the Federal government and the Atomic Energy Commission should do what is necessary to move them towards this quote “normal city” unquote. Of course, we have never been a normal city and we never will be because of our background. So, by the time I got here there was, the citizens were very active, very involved in this process. We had this much younger community then, we had all sorts of boards and commission, the League of Women Voters, I remember they were some of the first to come into our office, The Oak Ridger office to make their presence known and make their priorities known. Their priorities as the case over the years were very good priorities. They were working hard to try to lay down the foundations for our self-government here. There was never a lack of community news here, and we jumped into that. Our newspaper was always full of local news, and very often controversial local news. We always made fun of the number of organizations that were here in Oak Ridge and there are still a lot of them. We pointed out that there were seven or eight sections of the African Violet Society that existed here in Oak Ridge. So, it was a lively young vigorous, somewhat contentious, community because we had varying citizen opinions, but it was a livewire town. It was a great town to be young like I was. I was only 25 when I came here, and there are a lot of things that, of lessons I had to learn as a newspaper editor, and as a person. I came here. I met my wife here. We were married just about a year after I came, a little bit longer, and I was typical of a lot of people who got married here in Oak Ridge in those years. A lot of us got married up on the Chapel-on-the-Hill, and have lived here many, many years. I don't know if that answered your question but this was a livewire town. Of course, you particularly are familiar with things like the community Playhouse, which had organized, we had already had the symphony that organized, all of those cultural organizations were active and vibrant. I was originally from Pennsylvania, I had been in the Army for two and a half years, so I had traveled a little bit, when I had first contemplated coming as a young newspaperman coming to Tennessee. I thought I was headed for the boonies. Well I wasn't. I had discovered this wonderful community here in Oak Ridge with wonderful people, and I shudder sometimes to think if I might have said, “No”, to that opportunity, because this has been such a great place to be during that particular stage of my life, during those years.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure there have been, through the years, especially, you know, in the newspaper business, that there have been colorful characters in this town. Can you, are there, you know, a couple or three that you can tell me about?
MR. SMYSER: Oh, well, it's funny. The first one that comes to mind was a man named William Woods. I guess “colorful” describes him. He was a, he wrote letters to the editor at least once a week. They were always very good letters, and they were very frequently taking umbrage with us. He was a great taskmaster of the language. I don't think I will ever again say, “Ever again.” I don't think I will ever again say, “Once again.” He would call us and say, “You don't have to say ‘once again.’ It says the same thing.” So I would mention him. We did several feature stories on Bill Woods, and on his letter writing, and actually we became good friends, even though many times we differed. Oh well, I can't forget the Daffodil Man. Daffodil Man walked into our office down there on Tyrone Road, I think it was the spring of 1950, right. The year right after we had opened the gates, so people like him could come to town. I have a very wonderful, well I have always had a wonderful staff, but I had a couple of particularly imaginative young people on my staff, and one of them, Helen Knox, who is still cooking up in Pittsburgh, who is going to visit me in a couple of weeks. Helen recognized the Daffodil Man as a story immediately. She saw his appearance, his mountain man look and the fact that he was coming here to Oak Ridge, this new city bring his yellow bouquets of Spring as we called them, and we promoted him heavily. He used to stand up here in front of what now is Jacobs Engineering, it used to be the department store location, and we made a personality out of him. I credit The Oak Ridger for doing that, and don't apologize for it, because he was a great story, and he has become an institution. At least his family has become an institution here in Oak Ridge. He has long since deceased. So, I would mention him as one of the, and he is also important as he is kind of represented, here is this young, brash, upstart new city embracing a good ole mountain man, a good ole boy from the hills of Tennessee, and this relationship between us was kind of symbolic and important, and it represented our efforts too ... Oh, who else is a character. You've kind of caught me unawares here. I'm afraid that I have always made a point of pointing out in Oak Ridge, diversity was important and it existed. Where else would you have a community where the guy who ran the Holiday Bureau at Christmas was named Jerry Goldberg. That was Jerry Goldberg for years, he is now deceased also, but he for many years, he was head of our Holiday Bureau, and each year he would make this appeal to help the Holiday Bureau take charity out into the county. I always felt that was symbolic of the mix of cultures, and to some extent the lack of customary prejudices and so forth that we had here in Oak Ridge. Although we did for the first 25 years, Oak Ridge was pretty much a segregated community. We worked at that. We were a little bit ahead of most other southern towns as far as adjusting and correcting that problem, but we were a segregated community. I'm getting off the track now.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok.
MR. SMYSER: For characters ...
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok.
MR. SMYSER: I have a long list I've used sometimes in making a talk of where else but Oak Ridge. Where else but in Oak Ridge for years the local veterinarian be referred to as Dr. Robinson, by distinguished Nobel Prize winning scientist like Eugene Wigner who called him Mr. Wigner. This was a product, this was the result of a policy that Alvin Weinberg initiated out at the Laboratory, of not referring to people with PhD degrees as doctor but rather referred to them as mister. I remember how much we welcomed that policy because we were always getting in trouble here at The Oak Ridger by failing to call somebody “doctor” if they had an advance degree, or calling somebody “doctor” who did not have the advanced degree. So when Alvin Weinberg laid down that policy at the Laboratory, we endorsed it heartily, and our policy then was that anyone with a medical degree would be referred to as doctor. That is why Robby Robinson our veterinarian became Dr. Robinson, but it was Mr. Weinberg, Mr. Wigner, Mr. Snell, Mr. Cohn, that was another little quirk about Oak Ridge. I should have brought my list, because I have a whole list. Well I don't want to get back into the mud days, because I was not party to that. But I used to say where else but Oak Ridge would kids go to a shoot-them-up movie at the Center Theater, which is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse, on a Saturday afternoon and comeback on Sunday for church service, and demand popcorn for the church service, and all kinds of stories like that. There is a story about the time that the church service was held at the Center Theater where the marquee was advertising "Hells a Poppin'". Or the time, I'm not sure that this is true or not but it makes a great story. The time was Easter time when you walked into the Good Friday services and the marquee read "Cheaper by the Dozen," those kind of stories about Oak Ridge. There is a marvelous story, and again, I am not sure how true it is. Ruth Cary, dear soul we miss, and Milton, we miss so much, they are both now deceased, used to tell how for a certain period how a Catholic was the president of the Jewish congregation here. I forget exactly how it happened. It was all had something to do with somebody's husband dying and the wife taking over or the reverse of that, but they swore that that was true, that there was a period that when they had the president of the Jewish congregation was a Catholic. That kind of strange thing happened here. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you ever get involved in politics?
MR. SMYSER: No, I judiciously avoided it because I was the editor of the paper. We took stands, we supported candidates, so I was involved in politics to that extent, but assiduously we avoided involvement of staff members. There was one notable exception to that, which sort of taught us some lessons. In our early years, we had a city editor who ran for city council and was elected, and in retrospect I wish we had, I wish I or somebody higher up had told him that he shouldn't do that, but he did. He was very popular, and was probably a good city councilor, and it was not a city council, but a town council, this was the advisory town council. I think that was the only time that we strayed from avoiding public office, and trying to avoid conflicts of interest, but, of course, we got involved with politics, because we took sides on controversial issues, and we took sides on candidates, particularly for state senator or governor we would support candidates. To that extent we were involved, but not actively as individuals.
MR. MCDANIEL: You're still involved with the newspaper. Do you still write?
MR. SMYSER: I am retired. The newspaper has been very kind to me. They have allowed me to keep an office where all of my accumulation of the years is still much there. I try to get rid of a little of it each week or so, and they use my office for other things, but I still have an office and I write a column twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is my extent of my involvement, and I am paid a nominal sum for those columns, but other than that I am not on The Oak Ridgers' payroll.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, I'm going to have to stop real quick.
[End of Interview]

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SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF DICK SMYSER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 10, 2003
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok. So, tell me, tell me ... first off, you can say, you know, I'm Dick Smyser and I was the publisher of The Oak Ridger or whatever you were or the editor of the Oak Ridger from such and such, if you could just start out with that.
MR. SMYSER: I'm Dick Smyser, and I was the first editor of The Oak Ridger. Actually my title at the beginning was Managing Editor. I was here from the very first issue in January 20th, 1949, and remained as a working editor until about 1986, well actually a little bit later than that. In 1986 I took a leave for a year as a visiting professor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage for a year. Came back here for another year, and then went to become a visiting professor at three other universities. So I became something less than a fulltime editor from about 1987 through about 1993, when I officially retired from The Oak Ridger.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you came here what year?
MR. SMYSER: 1949.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1949.
MR. SMYSER: January, 1949.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so tell me a little bit about Oak Ridge when you first came here, when you were first ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, it was still very much in the transition stage from World War II towards what we then referred to, we wanted to become a normal city, end quotes, and the town was, the severe mud days were over, but it was still somewhat of a frontier town. They were only then beginning to install sidewalks, and curbs, and paved roads in the residential area, but still had very much the pioneer spirit about it. It was recovering from the impact after the immediate, after World War II, there were massive layoffs, particularly at the Y-12 Plant, and many people thought the town was going to disappear as quickly as it had appeared, and we were part of, the newspaper was part of the effort to convince people otherwise. With me, Alfred and Julia Hill the original founders of the Oak Ridger, the parents of Tom Hill who is still here, and very much here in town, they were sought out by the Federal government to come down here and start a daily newspaper, a free press, free enterprise newspaper, because the Fed felt a community newspaper was essential to the town making its transition to self-government and private home ownership. So we were enlisted to help with that effort. Although we were unrestricted like any other newspaper, but we knew from the start that that was our mission, that that was our big story, covering the transition period.
MR. MCDANIEL: What about, tell me about your staff. Tell me a little bit about ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, we had a quite small staff at that time, we had, I was the managing editor, we had a city editor, we had a sports editor, we had the, in those days we called it the women's editor, and I guess we had one or two reporters. So it was pretty much about a five or six person staff in 1949 when we put out our first issue. Yes, we established our own newspaper plant. Actually, the Hills were, the Hills made the commitment to start the newspaper in the early fall of 1948. They named Don McCarry who, Don McCarry and I were working at that time for the Chester, Pennsylvanian Times, which Alfred and Julia Hill, they're publishing at that time, that's how we ended up down here. Don was the advertising manager; I was just a young reporter on their staff, and then Alfred named Don the publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Don came down here probably as early as October or November 1948 and accomplished what many in the newspaper business thought was a miracle. They were able to get, start from the very beginning, and get all the equipment necessary so that we could put out a newspaper on January 20th. Interesting little sideline to that, as Alfred Hill and Julia Hill negotiated, it was then the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of Oak Ridge, and it was the only civilian-created agency that took over from the military at World War II. Alfred said, “Do you want us to be in publishing?” And they said, “Well, we plan to take down the gates of the city on January 20th, 1949, and what we need for you to do is put out your first issue on that day.” Well, we did, but they didn't. We made the deadline, but they didn't. They didn't open the gates until two months later on March 19th of 1949. We have always sort of held that over their heads, because it really was that. We moved to an old laundry building down on Tyron Road. People have lived here for twenty or thirty years will remember that that is where we were located for our first twenty or thirty years, and we literally turned that building into a newspaper plant. That is no small feat, because newspapers in those days, the equipment was heavy, big cumbersome presses, big cumbersome linotype machines, and to locate all of that equipment, and get it operating, literally within the space of, let's see from October to January, that's about four months. Don McCarry was here on the scene. Don is deceased, his daughter is Connie Adams, and they were still very much here in Oak Ridge and with The Oak Ridger until about a week ago, but he accomplished that miracle. I was, didn't actually come here until about a week before we started publication, so I can't claim any great credit for amassing those physical resources. But we got busy in a hurry, and we were busy from the first day. Oak Ridge was a, turned out an amazing amount of news and still does, local news.
MR. MCDANIEL: What ... local news.
MR. SMYSER: That was what we came here to do, to cover the local news story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me a little bit about that relationship between the government and the newspaper and, I'm sure there were, I'm sure there were times you were frustrated because you wanted to get information about things, or maybe you weren't. Maybe you just knew that was the nature of the ...
MR. SMYSER: Well, we reflected the community and, of course, the community was frustrated during, the crucial years were 1949-1959, those were the transition years, and the community was very frustrated because it took a long time to get the Atomic Energy Commission to make, what we felt, were the necessary commitments. These are some of the same issues that we are talking about today. The community properly wanted assurances that the Atomic Energy Commission was going to pay, make a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes because we couldn't tax our chief industry, and we wanted to be sure that when they sold the houses that they sold them in an orderly fashion, so that there wasn't chaos. It took very involved congressional legislation to get all of this done, and there were many moments of frustration and impatience along the way with the establishment here. It was never a suggestion on the part of the Atomic Energy Commission that we should be other than a free, aggressive, skeptical, questioning press. I will tell you just one little incident, and there were many people in town that didn't think that we would be that, they thought we were going to kowtow to the, that we were going to be under the control of the Federal government. Just within weeks after we started our publication we came to what was then was a major issue, though it sounds kind of trivial now. There were many residents that lived in dormitories, and all of a sudden the contractor, the Federal contractor for the dormitories raised the rent. It caused a tremendous stink on the part of the dormitory residents. They protested loudly, they wrote letters to the editor, and we carried those letters. And a number of people came in to us and said, “You mean you're going to put in a letter that is critical of the powers that be here,” and we said, “Of course we are.” So we sort of gained some credentials. It was kind of good that that issue happened when it did. We gained credentials then and throughout that ten-year process. There were, as you say, there were many frustrations, but that was our big story. It is not often that a whole city makes the transition from being completely Federal ly owned and operated, to a self-governing home-owning community. That was our story. It went on day after day, development after development.
MR. MCDANIEL: What, in your tenure here, especially related to Oak Ridge and the industry, the government, what were some of the big stories that you covered? I know there were many, many, many but what are, you know, three or four that ...?
MR. SMYSER: Well, that was the big story. I say it continued, and there was development after development. If I could put my finger on any specific instances: there was finally the passage from the government, from the Congress, we called them the disposal bills, (it sounds like garbage collection), we referred this transition period as the community disposal bill. In fact, that was the name of the bill, the Community Disposition Bill. You can look at the headlines out here in the hallway, and you will see many of the developments along the way. There is one big headline out there that says, “Ike signs disposal hospital.” What that meant was that Eisenhower had signed the bill that Congress had passed, that set-up the framework to allow the government, in an orderly way, to sell the homes to encourage self-government. Prior to that package, it was that the Federal Government agreed to build us a new hospital, so that was that headline, and other than that, oh, we've got a big headline out there, “ORNL generates electricity.” The first reactor to generate its own electricity was a big story, a major story here, and then, of course, we had other developments later on, the Clinton desegregation controversy was one of our big major stories. I'm getting a little off the track now. I'm up to 1956 now.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok. That's all right.
MR. SMYSER: Well, we had other big stories to cover: James Earl Ray escapes, was a big story. That was 1977. The press came down here from all over the country, in fact all over the world, and set up shop in our building. We were still over there at Tyrone Road. We did have one major radiation incident here in June of 1958. There was at Y-12 an exposure of about, oh I think about 12, 15 persons out there, only about half of those were seriously exposed, none of them were fatally exposed, at least not at that time. Some of them died some years later, I guess from some of the aftereffects, but that was a big story. I remember that broke just at our press time, we literally stopped the presses, and at least got a little bit in the paper that kind of assured the community that even though it was serious, and they evacuated the whole Y-12 area, that there was no threat to the community. So there were other big stories along the way, but major and continuing was this transition, and selling the houses. Once they established the prices for the houses, people were reassured because the prices were very reasonable. They setup a priority system whereby the occupant of the home had the first opportunity to buy, and virtually everybody bought their house, and we would track those day-by-day. How many houses were sold and where they were sold. There was never any lack of local news. There was constant, constant local news. Then another major story, continuing story was the kind of relationship of Oak Ridge to the surrounding area here. Our relations to Anderson County: there was antagonism, social conflicts, cultural conflicts between the people here in Oak Ridge and the rest of Anderson County, and the resentment went both ways. I guess the most specific characterization of that were our bi-annual, was it bi-annual, that was every two years, yes, semi-annual is every six months, was literally our bi-annual liquor referendums. In those years, the only way, the Tennessee law provided only for a county option as to if liquor should be sold legally, and the Oak Ridge preponderant opinion was that legal sales was the proper way to go about it. The people outside of Oak Ridge and the rest of Anderson County felt directly opposite of that. So we would have these once every two years, you could have a liquor referendum, a county referendum every two years, and we had them virtually once every two years, and then in 1947, and the vote would always be, in Oak Ridge it would be 6 to 1 for legal control and about 10 to 1 against it out in the county, and they usually won by a small margin, although in 1947 the vote was in favor of legal sales. Although many people felt, even people here in Oak Ridge who were very disposed towards legal sales, they felt that there was a good bit of maneuvering of the ballots particularly at some of the Oak Ridge precincts, and that probably the Wets as we called ourselves had won but not in a very honest way. Very quickly in 1951, the pattern of the Dries winning, and that went on as I say about every two years, and that was always a source of friction. The Clinton Courier and News, a very fine weekly newspaper, was edited and published by Horace Wells. He was always heavily in support of prohibition in the county and we would always equally heavily in support of legal sales. So that is that kind of shows you the contrast and the opinions of people here in Oak Ridge and people outside of Oak Ridge. Which is not to say that there weren't significant prohibition-inclined people in the city also, it's just that the preponderance was in favor of legal sales. Well, we differed on other things too. Well first of all, in Oak Ridge’s early years, we were miserably under-represented both in our county government and in our state government. There was a period there, I think if we researched it we probably could have established that we were the least represented city in the country as far as having representation in the legislature that reflected our population, and representation in our, we called it the Anderson County Court in those days instead of the Anderson County Commission. As far as that, we had two, we called them JP's, the Justice of the Peace or Squires. We had two members of the court that was as large as 25 to 30 members, and here we were, in those days, with more than half of the population of the county, so this was a constant source of contention. We had trouble getting the right to vote here in Oak Ridge. This was before, but in the earliest years, there were no voting precincts in Oak Ridge. Oak Ridgers, if they wanted to vote, even in the presidential election of 1944, they had to drive to Clinton to vote. There was one famous instance where county officials, one of them made the routes to, to Clinton and it was over the Edgemore Bridge, which was an old rickety bridge, wooden panel bridge that you were never quite sure you were going to get over it. They closed that bridge the day before Election Day on some pretext of maintenance or something like that, so there were obstacles thrown in the way of Oak Ridgers on the part of County officials. So it was a two-way street, and finally we did get our voting precincts. Here, we got two at first and then four, and then we finally got eight, and then we finally got twelve, which is what we got. Oh I'm not sure what the number is now, I'm sure the number has been reduced a little bit. So there were those tensions. It was, probably the, the abuses were probably equal on both side. The county officials were not happy about all of a sudden this impact of this variegated population on what then were the established political patterns of the county, and they were anxious to hang on to their powers and Oak Ridge was threatening, so those were some of the tension of that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question, and I know now, The Oak Ridger, in the last few years, I've seen it, you know, fairly regularly challenge the government on issues, as well as they do, you know, not only the, not only the local, you know, city, county government, but, you know, the Federal Government about certain issues. Was that the case early on?
MR. SMYSER: Oh yes, the issues were different. We didn't have much, we weren't terribly concerned about, and maybe we should have been more concerned about environmental hazards here. That is the big tension point now of the government doing its role as far as cleaning up what were acknowledged insults to the environment here. Are they adequately compensating employees who were perhaps were or assuredly were damaged as far as their health was concerned. Those were not issues in those years. The issues were, well one of the issues is, was the government moving quickly enough towards on these issues relative to the sale and self-government, but there were other issues also. Oh, we had many fights over rent increases. The whole town you know, was subject to a massive rent increase on the part of the Federal Government. In retrospect, you look back on those and they are kind of silly, because we paid very little rent, but when they raised it there was a howl and a stink. I'm trying to think of some of the other issues. There were a lot of issues between the community and the Atomic Energy Commission. We did not have a legal city council until after we incorporated in 1959. Prior to that we had what we called an advisory town council, which was elected by the residents. On our own terms, we were not, we weren't a legal entity, so we couldn't hold elections on, under state election rules, but we had our own rules. There were many tensions: mostly was the government moving fast enough or adequately enough towards what we wanted, which was to establish our self-government, to buy our property, and to buy the land. So lots of disputes, and lots of letters to the editor, and lots of irate citizen delegations relative to those issues. In fact at one time, we joked in The Oak Ridger that we should have an airplane named the "Irate citizen," which would regularly carry citizens back and forth to Washington. Very frequently, we would have to go to Washington to complain about something to our congressman or our senator, as normally you would have gone to City Hall, we had to go to Washington. Our congressman was Howard Baker, Senior, the father of Howard Baker, Junior, who is now the Ambassador to Japan, I believe, and anyway, he was our congressman and we had to appeal to him on issues that now would be strictly local issues, we had to complain to him. Frequently there were congressional hearings relative to some seemingly minor community issue. Well I could recite four or five of them. One, we had a department store up here in Jackson Square, which most of the citizens, these are a generalization, felt was not doing its job: it was not carrying good stock, charged unfair prices many felt, and there was a feeling that we really needed a better department store. Of course the newspaper was finally interested in this because we needed the advertising. But that issue went to Congress, if you can believe that. That issue as to whether our department store was performing properly went right up to a congressional hearing in Washington. I had to attend one of those, and the issue, was should the lease for this department store, a Federal lease, be renewed or should the Fed go out and seek a better department store. So that's the kind of thing that now in retrospect sounds ridiculous that the U.S. Congress could have been concerned with this. As it turned out Congress agreed with us, that the previous department store was not doing a good job, and we got Loveman's from Chattanooga in their place, which was widely celebrated in the community, because we felt that they could do a much better job. So that is descriptive of the thing. One other thing I can remember being an issue before Congress or a Senate committee was whether or not the then operating contractor for the community, Roane Anderson Company, had wisely spent money to build fences around our garbage cans in the cemesto area. We had garbage cans that sat out in front of the houses. The story is, this is Jackie Franklin, she was the wife of one of the managers for the Atomic Energy Commission here, was so distressed about the appearance of the community with these garbage cans sitting exposed, unsheltered around houses that she insisted that the operating contractor erect these fences around them, and that ended up in Congress being debated as to whether this is an unnecessary expense on the part of the Federal government. That's just a little bit descriptive of some of the seemingly trivial community issues that we couldn't settle locally and we had to travel to Washington to try to settle it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Outside of politics, talk a little bit about just community life. You know, what was, what was living in Oak Ridge in those early days and, you know, even through the first couple of decades, what was that like? I mean, socially, recreationally …
MR. SMYSER: Well, this was a livewire community even, as I said I came here in '49, by that time the town had sort of settled down. It had been through the war years where there was a sense of mission, and then particularly during the 1946 and 1947, where were the major changes and major lay-offs, and some big questions of what was going to happen to Oak Ridge. A lot of those questions were answered when the Senate and the Congress, after intense debate did decide to establish the Atomic Energy Commission, a civilian agency that would run the nuclear establishment, as opposed to the military. That was a major decision. Who knows what would have happened if that did not occur, because one of the first decisions that the Atomic Energy Commission made was that these communities, not just Oak Ridge, but Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, that they should remain communities and that the Federal government and the Atomic Energy Commission should do what is necessary to move them towards this quote “normal city” unquote. Of course, we have never been a normal city and we never will be because of our background. So, by the time I got here there was, the citizens were very active, very involved in this process. We had this much younger community then, we had all sorts of boards and commission, the League of Women Voters, I remember they were some of the first to come into our office, The Oak Ridger office to make their presence known and make their priorities known. Their priorities as the case over the years were very good priorities. They were working hard to try to lay down the foundations for our self-government here. There was never a lack of community news here, and we jumped into that. Our newspaper was always full of local news, and very often controversial local news. We always made fun of the number of organizations that were here in Oak Ridge and there are still a lot of them. We pointed out that there were seven or eight sections of the African Violet Society that existed here in Oak Ridge. So, it was a lively young vigorous, somewhat contentious, community because we had varying citizen opinions, but it was a livewire town. It was a great town to be young like I was. I was only 25 when I came here, and there are a lot of things that, of lessons I had to learn as a newspaper editor, and as a person. I came here. I met my wife here. We were married just about a year after I came, a little bit longer, and I was typical of a lot of people who got married here in Oak Ridge in those years. A lot of us got married up on the Chapel-on-the-Hill, and have lived here many, many years. I don't know if that answered your question but this was a livewire town. Of course, you particularly are familiar with things like the community Playhouse, which had organized, we had already had the symphony that organized, all of those cultural organizations were active and vibrant. I was originally from Pennsylvania, I had been in the Army for two and a half years, so I had traveled a little bit, when I had first contemplated coming as a young newspaperman coming to Tennessee. I thought I was headed for the boonies. Well I wasn't. I had discovered this wonderful community here in Oak Ridge with wonderful people, and I shudder sometimes to think if I might have said, “No”, to that opportunity, because this has been such a great place to be during that particular stage of my life, during those years.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure there have been, through the years, especially, you know, in the newspaper business, that there have been colorful characters in this town. Can you, are there, you know, a couple or three that you can tell me about?
MR. SMYSER: Oh, well, it's funny. The first one that comes to mind was a man named William Woods. I guess “colorful” describes him. He was a, he wrote letters to the editor at least once a week. They were always very good letters, and they were very frequently taking umbrage with us. He was a great taskmaster of the language. I don't think I will ever again say, “Ever again.” I don't think I will ever again say, “Once again.” He would call us and say, “You don't have to say ‘once again.’ It says the same thing.” So I would mention him. We did several feature stories on Bill Woods, and on his letter writing, and actually we became good friends, even though many times we differed. Oh well, I can't forget the Daffodil Man. Daffodil Man walked into our office down there on Tyrone Road, I think it was the spring of 1950, right. The year right after we had opened the gates, so people like him could come to town. I have a very wonderful, well I have always had a wonderful staff, but I had a couple of particularly imaginative young people on my staff, and one of them, Helen Knox, who is still cooking up in Pittsburgh, who is going to visit me in a couple of weeks. Helen recognized the Daffodil Man as a story immediately. She saw his appearance, his mountain man look and the fact that he was coming here to Oak Ridge, this new city bring his yellow bouquets of Spring as we called them, and we promoted him heavily. He used to stand up here in front of what now is Jacobs Engineering, it used to be the department store location, and we made a personality out of him. I credit The Oak Ridger for doing that, and don't apologize for it, because he was a great story, and he has become an institution. At least his family has become an institution here in Oak Ridge. He has long since deceased. So, I would mention him as one of the, and he is also important as he is kind of represented, here is this young, brash, upstart new city embracing a good ole mountain man, a good ole boy from the hills of Tennessee, and this relationship between us was kind of symbolic and important, and it represented our efforts too ... Oh, who else is a character. You've kind of caught me unawares here. I'm afraid that I have always made a point of pointing out in Oak Ridge, diversity was important and it existed. Where else would you have a community where the guy who ran the Holiday Bureau at Christmas was named Jerry Goldberg. That was Jerry Goldberg for years, he is now deceased also, but he for many years, he was head of our Holiday Bureau, and each year he would make this appeal to help the Holiday Bureau take charity out into the county. I always felt that was symbolic of the mix of cultures, and to some extent the lack of customary prejudices and so forth that we had here in Oak Ridge. Although we did for the first 25 years, Oak Ridge was pretty much a segregated community. We worked at that. We were a little bit ahead of most other southern towns as far as adjusting and correcting that problem, but we were a segregated community. I'm getting off the track now.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok.
MR. SMYSER: For characters ...
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok.
MR. SMYSER: I have a long list I've used sometimes in making a talk of where else but Oak Ridge. Where else but in Oak Ridge for years the local veterinarian be referred to as Dr. Robinson, by distinguished Nobel Prize winning scientist like Eugene Wigner who called him Mr. Wigner. This was a product, this was the result of a policy that Alvin Weinberg initiated out at the Laboratory, of not referring to people with PhD degrees as doctor but rather referred to them as mister. I remember how much we welcomed that policy because we were always getting in trouble here at The Oak Ridger by failing to call somebody “doctor” if they had an advance degree, or calling somebody “doctor” who did not have the advanced degree. So when Alvin Weinberg laid down that policy at the Laboratory, we endorsed it heartily, and our policy then was that anyone with a medical degree would be referred to as doctor. That is why Robby Robinson our veterinarian became Dr. Robinson, but it was Mr. Weinberg, Mr. Wigner, Mr. Snell, Mr. Cohn, that was another little quirk about Oak Ridge. I should have brought my list, because I have a whole list. Well I don't want to get back into the mud days, because I was not party to that. But I used to say where else but Oak Ridge would kids go to a shoot-them-up movie at the Center Theater, which is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse, on a Saturday afternoon and comeback on Sunday for church service, and demand popcorn for the church service, and all kinds of stories like that. There is a story about the time that the church service was held at the Center Theater where the marquee was advertising "Hells a Poppin'". Or the time, I'm not sure that this is true or not but it makes a great story. The time was Easter time when you walked into the Good Friday services and the marquee read "Cheaper by the Dozen," those kind of stories about Oak Ridge. There is a marvelous story, and again, I am not sure how true it is. Ruth Cary, dear soul we miss, and Milton, we miss so much, they are both now deceased, used to tell how for a certain period how a Catholic was the president of the Jewish congregation here. I forget exactly how it happened. It was all had something to do with somebody's husband dying and the wife taking over or the reverse of that, but they swore that that was true, that there was a period that when they had the president of the Jewish congregation was a Catholic. That kind of strange thing happened here. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you ever get involved in politics?
MR. SMYSER: No, I judiciously avoided it because I was the editor of the paper. We took stands, we supported candidates, so I was involved in politics to that extent, but assiduously we avoided involvement of staff members. There was one notable exception to that, which sort of taught us some lessons. In our early years, we had a city editor who ran for city council and was elected, and in retrospect I wish we had, I wish I or somebody higher up had told him that he shouldn't do that, but he did. He was very popular, and was probably a good city councilor, and it was not a city council, but a town council, this was the advisory town council. I think that was the only time that we strayed from avoiding public office, and trying to avoid conflicts of interest, but, of course, we got involved with politics, because we took sides on controversial issues, and we took sides on candidates, particularly for state senator or governor we would support candidates. To that extent we were involved, but not actively as individuals.
MR. MCDANIEL: You're still involved with the newspaper. Do you still write?
MR. SMYSER: I am retired. The newspaper has been very kind to me. They have allowed me to keep an office where all of my accumulation of the years is still much there. I try to get rid of a little of it each week or so, and they use my office for other things, but I still have an office and I write a column twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is my extent of my involvement, and I am paid a nominal sum for those columns, but other than that I am not on The Oak Ridgers' payroll.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, I'm going to have to stop real quick.
[End of Interview]